Children's Biography of Erasmus

The Man Who Laid the Egg. Louise A. Vernon (Herald Press, 1977), pb. 118 pp.

We are currently in a series of Vernon biographies as you can see. In the basics this one delivers as the others. The reader (and listeners!) is introduced to some of the basics in the life and work of Erasmus. As literature one ought not expect too much.

The story is told from the perspective of Gerhard Koestler, a (fictional) young man coming of age in Germany in the early 1500’s. Gerhard, born to a noble family but orphaned, runs away when his uncle decides to force him into a monastery. Gerhard wants to go to the University to learn and especially to learn the sort of things which Erasmus encourages. Eventually he ends up in the household of Erasmus having opportunity to learn from and observe the great man.

This volume, I think, is more disjointed and harder to follow than the others. There is less natural flow and it is more difficult (for me and then more so for my younger listeners) to keep up with the various characters who appear rapidly and often. In some defense, it must be difficult to construct a biography like this with perhaps little information for constructing a narrative while trying to connect with a younger audience.

The picture of Erasmus which emerges is interesting. In general it is the picture given by J. I. Packer and others- a brilliant man who did much good but in the end was hampered by a certain constitutional weakness and timidity. The author seems to desire to provide a basically positive picture while also dealing with Erasmus’ evasiveness. We are currently reading Mrs. Vernon’s bio of Luther and it is my hunch that her sympathies (like mine) lie more with Luther than Erasmus. It was a bit confusing to my boys at times to figure out whether Erasmus was good or bad. Of course this arises from having only two clearly defined categories- a good starting point, which then has to be developed to handle the nuances of real life. In the end I think they were able to see the parts of Erasmus that we would admire and the parts that we would not. It is important for a parent to know, though, that this sort of clarification and evaluation is not given in the book. So you will need to be prepared to do this yourself.

Lastly, as I mentioned before it would be nice to have a brief note on who is historical and who is not. I was not sure if the printer, Froben, was historical or not though he was mentioned enough that I thought he probably was. Then one night during the time we were reading this book I found on ebay a 16th century copy of a book by Erasmus which stated that it was printed by Froben! That was a fun discovery.